Cities will do anything to 'solve' the problem of homelessness except building enough housing for everyone.
You can't solve fentanyl with housing.
Obviously both are problems - but I think there are many people who would remain housed in spite of their addictions if housing was, on the whole, much cheaper.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mor...
[1] https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-highest-...
[2] https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/median-home-price/#medi...
How do you expect addicts and mentally ill people that can’t hold a job to hold housing? How do you reinsert them into the society?
I think it would be easier to create incentives for people to find work, support and housing in cheaper areas so they can get on their feet. It’s unrealistic in todays reality to expect new affordable housing in the most expensive cities in the country.
I also want to live cheap in SF or manhattan, unfortunately it’s not possible. So if I want that, I have to go to a Kansas, central Florida, etc. what is lacking in those places is accessibility, support and how to get there.
If that’s expected of me as a rational solution, should also be an option for a homeless person. What I cannot expect of a homeless person is for them to make it there and find something to do, secure a house, etc.
How much housing would you have to build in NYC, SF, Oakland, Seattle, Portland, Boston for it to be affordable? Doesn’t make sense to expect “housing” to pop up at levels that bring rent down from 4k to welfare levels in todays reality. We can talk about utopia all you want, but it’s not happening.
I don't know, I am just a skeptical person when it comes to making decisive causal inference from statistical data. That is very difficult.
https://vancouver.ca/files/cov/vancouver-homeless-count-2019...
If Books Could Kill: https://podcasts.apple.com/lv/podcast/san-fransicko/id165187...
The people who are drugged out and can't live in society peacefully are more visible, but they are by far the minority.
Grouping the majority of homeless, who are short term, with the people living in tents on the sidewalk, smoking meth freely, is a rhetorical trick
There's an unregulated credit bureau where apartment buildings report rental debts to enforce collection. If you have a record in that database, you can't get housing at most residential apartment buildings. This, of course, puts way too much power in the hands of apartment building owners and management companies.
They can set ridiculous terms in their leases, inflate prices, and otherwise do as they please. If you disagree, your only option is court. If you can't afford that, your only option is to comply. If you can't afford to comply, you're out of luck. Your next housing is likely to be an extended stay hotel for two or three times a typical rental for much shoddier housing without any kind of rental protection or eviction protection.
It's not just people on drugs or with mental health issues who are homeless. Those are the _visible_ homeless. The ones on the street without jobs. Not the person in a cubicle nearby who never tells you about their housing problem out of fear that it will negatively affect their professional prospects.
Even building luxury housing removes pressure from the lower end of the market, as if there’s no luxury housing people buy up distressed properties. It’s musical chairs and those who can’t afford the fixed number of chairs end up on the street.
1 - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/homeles...
Ithaca, NY is struggling with a large homeless colony. Ithaca has built enough new housing in the last few years that the skyline is transformed, there are cranes in the air like I've rarely seen in a city in the US. Ithaca also has robust public services, shelters, etc.
For the most part homeless people in Ithaca could get into a shelter and then get into some kind of permanent housing with public assistance but most of the people in "the Jungle" won't go through the process to get that for various reasons. This is a different situation from out west where public services are completely overwhelmed.
There’s a naive, common view that homelessness is primarily about “mental illness” and “drugs” and other potential contributors to homelessness; while those factors exist, the lower the cost of housing, the easier it is for someone on the margin of being housed or being homeless to stay housed. The lower the cost, the easier it is for family, SSDI, Housing Choice Vouchers (HCV, formerly called Section 8), and other income supports to keep a person housed. Intuitively, this makes sense: it’s easier to cover $750 in rent than $2,000 in rent, even for someone with mental illness and drug problems. As the cost of housing goes up, the number of people who fall from the margins of being “housed” to being “homeless” goes concomitantly up. While mental illness and drug abuse are factors, they’re secondary to housing costs, and they’re really red herrings relative to overall housing costs and ongoing housing shortages across America.
The homelessness problem is intractable without zoning reform and the removal of barriers to new housing construction, whether those barriers are height maximums, parking space minimums, or “neighborhood input” or “community input.”
The article is clearly about the minority of homeless who are long term drug abusing street dwellers. Different problem, different solution.
Very high profile efforts to put the latter in free housing have failed.
On the other hand I have a friend (who is incidentally also a drug user but not so far gone that she couldn't stop when forced to wear a drug detecting patch to get her kid back) who became homeless. She immediately got into a shelter and now months later is moving into an apartment with her rent (I think) paid at least partly by the city. So anecdotally (and from some reading) the former group already has working solutions
Read the book, and look at the evidence rather than trying to reason from random feelings.
Sure if we can indefinitely add huge amounts of housing everywhere year over year we will have "solved" this problem, as the evidence shows! However, I can't imagine this is the best use of our time and resources. I'd rather look for more sustainable solutions.
The second, more visible group, is a completely different story. But just allowing people to build housing instead of creating archaic and backwards rules that prevent any building will solve a huge part of it.
See the giant thread around homeschooling we had yesterday.
Every solution has to be at the level of the individual or the business. This places a lot of constraint over what would be common-sense solutions in rest of the world. There are trade-offs between being part of the society and being alone. If Japan were to be an example of an extreme societal compliance, US is in extreme in "me for myself, screw the rest" approach.
There is the old quote “the Americans will always do the right thing. Right after they have tried everything else”. It feels like this in a lot of social issues like health care.
But they easily can become them if few more things will go wrong.
Not banning housing construction and lowering its prices helps people on border (and if someone has larger house/flat or has own one - they can help their family/friends)
More specifically, except to allow the building of enough housing, through removing onerous regulation.
lets go for simpler one, not banning building housing
Wow, looks like it was a pretty complicated situation. I don't think OPs reference to it made any sense. Might make sense for a checklist of what not to do with regards to public housing.
Homelessness is a game theory problem. The first city that "builds enough homes to house everyone" get to house everyone in the country. Why would Los Angeles ever build housing, if San Francisco is doing it for them?
The first city to solve this is punished mercilessly. Why would any city subject themselves to that, when they can anticipate that it would happen? Doesn't matter what your politics are. Left and right both know that it will happen, and will refuse to do it because of the punishment.
Because this is a game theory problem, the solution is (surprising, to me at least) very bureaucratic. It doesn't involve people "just loving enough". You won't solve it by showing the world how charitable and compassionate you are. Some dislike that. Why was love not enough? Why was charity and compassion not enough?
Because it's a math problem, and love, charity, and compassion have never solved math problems. Similarly, accusations that greed or callousness interfere are just plainly wrong too.
What's needed is a system that allocates the homeless across all the tends of thousands of municipal and local governments, such that small towns aren't overwhelmed with thousands, and large cities don't somehow cheat and solve their fair share of the homelessness issue by buying bus tickets for them. Such a system can be achieved via policy alone from the ground-up, no need for state or federal government to be involved (except possibly to pick up some small part of the tab for the few who would inevitably fall between the cracks).
The majority of homelessness is brought about as a result of circumstances, not drugs.
Domestic Violence, lack of affordable housing, lack of social safety nets, LGBTQ individuals ousted from their families, mental illness with lack of support.
I was homeless for 3 years, because I was LGBT and my parents cut me off from support. Rent in Seattle doubled when Amazon moved in, and the roommates I was living with were unreliable. I ended up homeless and moved to a small town that had even less amenities and had the mentality that if I was homeless I must have been on drugs.
I was treated with disdain by most of the people I was trying to get help from, finding a job was much harder without a permanent address. Housing assistance programs had 3 year waitlists. I was told if I wanted more assistance I should have a baby because it would push me to the front of the list.
The "cracked out methhead smearing human excrement on the walls" is someone that needs psychiatric help, not jail. And they are a relatively small portion of the homeless population.
The idea that we can't do anything for 4 people because 1 of them has a drug problems is absurd.
It was subsequently shut down because it couldn't compete with private banks.
(Edited for tone. Sorry about that!)
The goal of a postal bank is often framed in terms of a source of revenue for the USPS. Examples include in this very thread. If there's no expectation of net-positive revenue, then there needs to be a different justification for why the post office should spend money to offer everyone banking service inevitably inferior to the private sector. Plus, now you have all the politics that come with a subsidized service and paying for it. If it can pay for itself, it's much simpler.
Postal banking is often advanced as an idea for a public service that will eat Wall Street's lunch to the benefit of all. We should be at least a bit skeptical of the unvarnished optimism of that. Further, I think that if we're going to seriously discuss the topic we need to grapple seriously with why the US doesn't have one anymore.
Again, you're presenting things in commercial terms, but this was never meant to be a commercial enterprise.
>Postal banking is often advanced as an idea for a public service that will eat Wall Street's lunch to the benefit of all.
That is a silly idea, but it seems you're ignoring the good idea. Again, this idea is: pay for a service that ensures Americans always have minimum viable banking. Upshots include: poor people can participate in the economy and in some cases, pull themselves out of poverty.
This means questions like "How will this be paid for?" are not idle distractions to derail good ideas with impossible perfection. They are key obstacles to be overcome. To have USPS run a bank as a non-self-funding public service would mean they would have to go to Congress to raise prices to subsidize it. This is always a political process, and I imagine the cost of things like stamps falls more on the poor than on the rich.
Alternatively, you could find a way to rework the entire legal and financial infrastructure of the USPS so that it does run on direct federal funding. This is, to put it mildly, a lot of work.
Whether or not it's a good idea depends in no small part on what your precise goals are and how you expect to achieve them. If your goal is for poor people to have access to basic banking services, then the Bank On program and local credit unions might be better options for many people. If your goal is for poor people to have access to credit, then a postal bank is probably not a good choice unless you want lots of poor people having their credit wrecked by a public service.
Generally the idea is to have a public bank with the postal system being a convenient vehicle for that, rather than some deep and fundamental ties between post offices and banks in the modern world. The postal service in the US might not be as ideal a vehicle as it is in some other places.
In summary, a postal bank that can pay for itself is far more likely to get set up and deployed widely. This is an important point because of how USPS is regulated.
But that being said, while banking the unbanked is IMHO a good thing, I'm not convinced that it would be a meaningful change to reducing homelessness - if they get a job, they can get paid in various other ways, and the problem with loans is not with executing the loan payment, but with someone willing to lend them money and accept the risk of default.